Dog teams on Svalbard

This old gem of a find was first posted by ploppy in the oGEC about 8 years ago. At the time there was just one small swath of imagery near the capital of Svalbard, Longyearbyen. The sleds, drivers, and dog teams aren't really visible, but their shadows make them easy to interpret. The imagery is historical imagery so I have set the time for 2007. In the original THREAD, there is a discussion about the imagery disappearing over time as Google updated the view of the area. Luckily we have the historical imagery to be able to view this unique find. Historical imagery is not perfect and sometimes old swaths are lost, but we are lucky this time. I have made a screen capture , but even those sometimes go away. 

Attachments:

Dog teams Svalbard and Jan Mayen.kmz (856 B)

I just noticed that if I look at the date the sun, based on shadow detail is almost directly to the south. Looking at a sunrise/sunset calendar for 2006, the date in Google earth must be wrong because the sun does not even come above the horizon for that day. It never reaches closer than an azimuth of -11. We've realized that the dating is often imprecise, but it is certainly so here. 

Also the default imagery for Longyearbyen shows the sun high to the NW, so the 6-14-2012 imagery date is possibly correct. Shadow direction indicates a time of about 2100 hours = 9 PM. It looks like the sun will be above the northern horizon at midnight.

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Thanks for resurrecting this old goody, Hill, I remember what a treat it was when ploppy found this. Here is my old Svalbard dog kennel find, which I never would have seen without first looking at ploppy's post. It appears in several imagery dates, but the best are 2006 (my original find) and the June 2012 update, which shows that the kennel was expanded and reconfigured.  My link is for the 2006 winter view, my favorite.  


www.croptrust.org

Sorry, the photo link is broken, so the url is the best I can do in case you want to try looking for it. While you're there, check out this superb virtual tour of the Svalbard International Seed Vault.  There is also a very good Panoramio shot of the kennel near my placemark.

Sled dog kennel.kmz (1.06 KB)